Chesapeake Bay Leaders Approve Cleanup Plan They Call ‘Achievable’

BALTIMORE – Leaders of the Chesapeake Bay cleanup approved major revisions Dec. 2 to the pact that has guided the effort for more than a decade, vowing speedier results despite uncertainty over federal funding.

“We are impatient,” said Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat and the outgoing chair of the Chesapeake Executive Council. “We want this to be the era of yes and now.”

The reworked Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement extends deadlines for cleanup goals to 2040, 57 years after the first agreement was signed in 1983. The latest action comes after earlier versions of the agreement— inked in 1987, 2000 and 2014 — fell short of achieving the central goal of significantly reducing nutrient and sediment pollution.

Bay cleanup agreements are signed by the Executive Council of the Chesapeake Bay Program, a state-federal partnership that guides the restoration effort. The council is composed of the governors of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Delaware, New York and West Virginia; the mayor of the District of Columbia; the chair of the Chesapeake Bay Commission and the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Many of the goals in the 2014 agreement faced a 2025 deadline. Last year, the Executive Council called on scientists and policymakers to wrap up its overhaul by the end of this year. Program staff had initially recommended a two-year process.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, pushed the partnership to move quickly as he assumed the role of Executive Council chair for 2026.

“We live by three letters in Pennsylvania,” he said at a press conference following a closed-door meeting with his fellow council members. “We focus on ‘GSD.’ Since this is a highbrow crowd, I’ll just say that stands for ‘getting stuff done.’ … That is the way I intend to lead this organization forward.”

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, said he would continue pressing the Bay Program to pick up the pace even after he leaves office due to term limits in January.

“That’s one of the main themes, I think, that this renewed commitment embodies not just aspirational goals but achievable goals that will be achieved in a reasonable, if not surprising, pace,” he said.

Five jurisdictional leaders participated in the meeting, with Delaware’s Democratic Gov. Matt Meyer and D.C.’s Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser joining Moore, Shapiro and Youngkin. The last time so many of the region’s top elected leaders showed up to the annual gathering was in 2014 at the Maryland State House in Annapolis.

This year’s meeting was hosted in Maryland as well but farther up the Bay at the National Aquarium, which overlooks Baltimore’s long-polluted Inner Harbor.

Environmentalists said they were encouraged to see such a show of support from top political figures. But many lamented that the newly revised agreement didn’t include more ambitious cleanup targets and that federal funding remains a question mark.

The changes reduced the number of goals from 10 to four and the number of outcomes from 31 to 21. But that streamlining isn’t as drastic as it looks, said Kristin Reilly, director of the Choose Clean Water Coalition.

“If you look at the [new] agreement, yes, there’s things that are missing now that have been combined, and there are a couple of new things,” she said in an interview. “But I would say that the core goals and outcomes that were in the original one, you’re still seeing them in there.”

Of those 31 outcomes, 18 have been achieved or are on track, according to a Bay Program review. Among them: restoring oyster reefs in 10 rivers, conserving an additional 2 million acres of land and improving fish passage.

But another dozen objectives are far from completion. Those include some of the effort’s most critical ecological goals, such as reducing nutrient pollution, creating wetlands, increasing forested streamside buffers and restoring underwater grasses.

In 2023, a group of Bay scientists published a report warning that efforts to improve the Chesapeake would continue to fall short without major changes. They specifically urged a shift away from focusing on shrinking the oxygen-starved “dead zone” in the Bay’s mainstem toward efforts to improve aquatic habitat in wetlands and along shorelines.

While the revised agreement doesn’t specifically reference that 2023 report, Bill Dennison, a vice president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and one of the Bay scientists who helped write it, said the new pact does call for reorganizing the state-federal partnership and does give more emphasis to improving shallow-water habitat.

“It’s like steering a battleship, you know?” Dennison said. “[The report] is calling for a pretty radical shift. What we’ve seen is a tendency in the right direction. But we have to keep vigilant and keep pushing.”

Asked if restoring the Bay is a realistic goal, Dennison replied, “‘Rehabilitation’ I like better than ‘restoration.’ We’re not going to restore it, but we’ll rehabilitate it into this new Bay that’s going to include blue catfish, climate change, microplastics and all the new, emerging challenges. But I think we can have a healthier Bay that we can all fish in.”

The Trump administration has proposed funding the Chesapeake Bay Program at $92 million, the same level it has received over the last three years. While Bay supporters were relieved by that news, they’re still worried about potential cuts to the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies whose research and expertise underlay much of the effort.

The EPA official who represented the agency at the Dec. 2 meeting, though, pledged that the administration stands “fully committed” to restoring the Bay and its 64,000-square-mile watershed.

“As we move forward, EPA is committed to building on the progress we’ve made to working with each of you to ensure that the Chesapeake Bay remains a symbol of both environmental renewal and American resilience,” said David Fotouhi, the EPA’s deputy administrator.

Hilary Harp Falk, president and CEO of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said the updated agreement “was not everything that we wanted.” For example, it doesn’t include a tight enough timeline for water quality improvements, she said. But she added it represents “the necessary next step, and we can build on what’s in the agreement.”

Also at the meeting, the Executive Council asked program staff to work with federally recognized tribal nations to develop recommendations by July 1 to better integrate them into the partnership.

With Shapiro formally taking helm of the Executive Council, it marks the first time a Pennsylvania governor has held that role since 2005 under Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell.